THE NUMBERS
BY PETER KEATING
Reaching for the Stars In today’s fast-paced NBA, the best teams know that height is less important in players than length. eight in basketball is the most obvious physical advantage any athlete can enjoy. But tracking the physical dimension of NBA bodies over time reveals a stark truth: Tall ain’t what it used to be. For decades, the pursuit of NBA championships was a race to the top, literally. From George Mikan to Bill Russell to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, humongous men dominated the court. But after the game opened up about 30 years ago, the titans’ influence started to wane. By the 1990s, the Big Dork, a breed of NBA player whose only job was to take up floor space (my favorite was Chris Dudley), became useless in the era of Michael Jordan. Still, NBA players at all positions kept getting taller, peaking at a leaguewide average of 6-foot-7 9/10 in 2000-01. Since then, average height has plateaued. The biggest big men can’t keep growing, for the same reason ants and tarantulas can’t survive in giant form like they do in old horror movies: As three-dimensional bodies add height, proportionally they add even more weight and, sooner or later, threaten to collapse under their own bulk. (Witness the short career of the great but 7-6 Yao Ming.) Moreover, as teams began to value 3-point shooting about a decade ago, they shifted minutes to the perimeter, and often to smaller players. Even so, many teams kept putting a premium on the tallest guys, to the point that the NBA actually overvalued height. Consider: In a 2011 study, my colleague Tom Haberstroh examined the height and productivity of every player drafted since 1996. He found that at four out of five positions on the court, the most effective height for players was shorter than average. (The exception was small forward.) For example, NBA shooting guards measured 6-5 on average. But shooting guards who were 6-3 had a mean player efficiency rating of 13.6, tops among the position. If performance lagged height, how much sense could it make to keep chasing altitude for its own sake? I’d say the fever finally broke in 2013, after six NBA teams drafted 7-footers in the first round only to watch the slightly shorter but no less clumsy Mason Plumlee(!) outplay them all. (The Knicks, of course, made the worst move: trading the equivalent of a lottery pick for 7-foot Andrea Bargnani only to watch him play like Andrea Bargnani.) Over the past couple of seasons, there has been a distinct shift in how the smartest GMs and analysts talk about NBA physiques. To oversimplify, height is out and length is in.
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Athletes with reach can give teams most of the skills traditionally associated with height, such as blocking shots and grabbing loose balls, without necessarily sacrificing the mobility that many giant players lack. And while every era sees some impressively long arms—legend had it Kevin McHale didn’t have to bend over to tie his shoes—a whole batch of today’s young superstars play above their height because of their extraordinary length. Most humans have an arm span roughly equal to their height, as in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous illustration. But Kawhi Leonard, who stands 6-7, has a wingspan of 7-3. (For more on how he’s changing the game, see page 42.) Kevin Durant is 6-10 but with a 7-5 reach. Anthony Davis was 6-11 with a 7-6 span when he was drafted in 2012 and was so young that he might have grown even longer since. Incredibly, the average NBA player has a wingspan 1.063 times his height—beyond the threshold for Marfan syndrome, a genetic illness that causes unusually long arms and legs, according to David Epstein, author of the book The Sports Gene. And now the best team in the league has elevated, or should I say extended, length to an art form. Beyond the sublime talents of Steph Curry, why are the Warriors always shooting over opponents, and how are they so disruptive on defense? Well, Golden State’s four other starters range from 6-7 to 7-0 in height but average 7-0 in wingspan. Make no mistake, that’s intentional: The Warriors spent their lone draft pick last year, a late firstrounder, on Kevon Looney, a 19-year-old out of UCLA known for his condorlike 7-4 arm span. When an entire roster has that kind of length, you might say its reach won’t exceed its grasp. With the Warriors now leading the way, a basic fact has taken root: The world’s most vertical game is going horizontal.
ILLUSTRATION BY JASON SCHNEIDER
